But it might be seen as heel for non prosperous native Polish peasants stuck in its gutter for centuries.

He was the first to denounce two million prosperous peasants and proclaimed: "Merciless war against these kulaks!

Livestock became a sign of progress: peasants, less dependent and more prosperous, became able to buy draft animals, and even plows.

They tell us almost nothing about the labourers employed by the more prosperous peasants.

Once, it might have housed a prosperous peasant and his family.

The more prosperous peasants, however, lost influence and power as the Normans made holding land more dependent on providing labour services to the local lord.

One stream was social and economic, the effort to create a nation of prosperous peasants and workers, one that controlled its resources and destiny.

This vision had decried the "evils of the machine age" and celebrated the agrarian ideal of the prosperous peasant working his own land.

But it will take three generations to restore the kulak" - the more prosperous peasants who were repressed by Stalin in the 1930's.

Kulak (derogatory Russian term for prosperous peasant)